Huawei P8 Specs And Pricing Info Leaks

When my carrier picked up the 2013 Huawei P7 I spent a couple of weeks with the device. I came away impressed: it wasn’t perfect but it was smoothly designed and had creditable performance (if indifferent battery life). The original P7 models have been and gone, Huawei are now preparing the replacement P8. A Weibo account has leaked more information about the specification of the new device, which we also believe will be announced run 15 April at a special London event.

The device is reported to be built from a zirconium oxide porcelain, which is a firm of glass related to that used by dentists for crowns. This glass body will probably benefit from Gorilla Glass 3 all around, too, and it’s going to be thin at just 6mm. Huawei have still found the space for a biometric fingerprint sensor and the Honor 6 Plus’ dual 8MP rear camera, single front 8MP setup. This rear-facing camera allows users to refocus images after they have been taken, similar to the HTC One M8, but using much higher resolution cameras. We’ve already seen rumors that the P8 is to use a 5.2-inch, 1080p resolution display but we didn’t know the rumored battery size was until this leak, which is showing as 2,600 mAh.

Under the skin, Huawei are planning on using their latest in-house processor, the Kirin 930. This processor is a 64-bit arrangement based on a big.LITTLE design of a high power quad core processor backed up by a high-efficiency quad core processor. We already knew this but what we didn’t know is that the 930 is based around the 16nm die size. The smaller the die size, the less voltage that must be applied to the processor. This is important because power consumption and heat output is proportional to the square of the voltage applied. This means that a numerically small reduction in voltage can make a large reduction in power used and heat created, both of which are going to be important for this relatively thin smartphone with the size of battery installed.

Going on the leak, it’ll be priced at around $480, which is a great price for stealing a march on the competition with a new generation, smaller die-sized processor. We’ll have to see how carefully optimized Huawei have made the P8’s software and of course, how well the processor, GPU and screen perform, but so far I’m colored impressed by this leak of Huawei’s 2015 flagship device.